NICOLA IANNELLO 

La tradizione individualistica nel pensiero di Hayek 

N. 164

Summary - The essay aims at the analysis of F.A. Hayek’s political philosophy and of some of the thinkers of the individualistic tradition Hayek refers to, with particular regard to Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School of Economics, to Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees, and to Alexis de Tocqueville, the insightful observer of the american democracy. The foundations of hayekian philosophy are a theory of knowledge based on the natural limitation and fallibility of human capacities; a theory of spontaneous emergencies of social order as an inintentional consequence of intentional individual actions (methodological individualism); the defence of the market, not only as an economic mechanism of production and distribution of wealth, but also as a vehicle of dispersed information which nobody could otherwise use; a presentation of the political principles of liberalism based on the necessary implication of law, property and freedom. Hayek is indebted to Menger for the formulation of the fundamental problem of theoretical social sciences: how can it happen that social institutions so important for the general welfare - as the state, the market, the law, but also the language and the religion - can grow up without a general will direct to their creation? The answer is the "organic" explanation of social phenomena. In the same sense is the link with Mandeville, considered the beginner of a reflexion on market society that will be completed by the Scottish Enlightenment (Hume, J. Tucker, A. Ferguson, A. Smith). The relationship with de Tocqueville is more complexed. If it is true that Hayek shares with him a sort of fear about freedom in modern democracies, it is to say that they value differently the role of economic activity: for the French historian it could be dangerous for freedom, for Hayek it is the condition of freedom.